


Your Voice Becomes Static

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Shisei no Koe | Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Genre: Gen, Pre-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2019-01-21 09:06:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12454098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: When she's young, Rei goes to the mountains with her family, and has an odd experience.





	Your Voice Becomes Static

**Author's Note:**

> Written a while ago for ffprompt. The prompt was to give Rei some past link to the story of FF3, like Miku and Mafuyu's Himuro connection, or Mio and Mayu's parallels with Yae and Sae.

"It's the mountain," her father said.

Rei had been dozing in the back seat of the car; now she woke a little, and watched through half-open eyes as he twisted the knobs on the radio. It was emitting odd sounds, nothing like the usual talk or music.

"Watch the road, dear," her mother cautioned.

"I know, I'm just trying - "

Rei was too young to know about radio waves and transmitters, or how the folds of ancient rock above them could block the signal. Her father said, _It's the mountains_ , making it sound quite ordinary, and as he ran up and down the band, Rei heard a buzzing and grinding, a muted crunch like stepping on ice under fresh snow, and a high, looping whistle that reminded her of the wind caught in some narrow space.

"Is that really what it sounds like?" Rei asked.

"What's that, Rei?" her father said absently, as her mother reached over and turned the radio off with a decisive click.

Rei didn't repeat herself. She didn't need an answer. Until she drifted off to sleep again, she looked out at the mountain with new eyes, craning to try and see the summit from her window. She wondered if it spoke to other mountains, or just to itself, and whether it knew they could hear it.

The next thing she knew, her brother had leaned over and was shaking her arm. "We're almost there," he said, "and look, it's snowing!"

* * *

Rei had never stayed in an old-fashioned inn before. Her brother had, though, when their mother had been sick with Rei and he'd been staying with their grandparents, so he spent most of the evening condescendingly explaining what to do and how she had to behave. She was glad when he and her father had to go to a separate part of the hot baths. One whole wall was taken up with windows that overlooked a garden, and it was strange to sit in steaming hot water, watching snow fall outside. Behind the white of the steam and the white of the snow, there were the mountains.

"Can I borrow the camera?" she asked later, as she and her mother were walking back to their room. "I want to take a photo of the snow."

"It won't be any good in the dark," her mother said, "but you can take one tomorrow if your father says so."

Rei didn't know how to explain that it was the dark she wanted to photograph, the half-black of the sky with the white veil moving in front of it. She sighed. "People do take pictures at night."

"I expect they have special cameras."

"What kind?"

"The expensive kind. Oh, now look, I've left my hand cream in the car. Dear, would you mind?"

"I'll go," Rei said at once, before her father could answer.

"With wet hair?" her mother said.

"I'll put my coat on. I'll put the hood up. Please?"

"She just wants to make footprints in the snow like a baby," her brother said, cheerfully out of arm's reach.

"All right," her father said. "Just be careful you don't slip. And don't run in the halls! Walk quietly, okay? Don't disturb the other guests."

Rei dutifully promised she wouldn't from inside the coat she was pulling, still zipped, over her head, and her father gave her the ring with his car keys. It felt weighty and important when she held it. As she made her way down the gloomy hall, she could hear other people moving and talking on the other sides of the doors. In secret she pretended to be a cat, creeping stealthily through the night, and hoped no one would catch her and interrupt the game. Nobody did. A minute later, she had her outdoor boots on and was crunching down the path from the entrance, towards where the cars were parked - and whatever she had told her brother, it was satisfying to see the line of her footprints growing behind her.

All the cars were slowly disappearing under the snow. It was falling so thickly now that she couldn't even see the inn, and when she opened the car, the automatic light came on and lit up the windows, all overlaid with white. Her mother's hand cream was in the glove compartment, but that wasn't really why Rei had come. She put the key in the ignition and switched on the radio.

Again those strange sounds. She'd heard something like them, of course, in bursts of interference and between stations. She'd thought nothing of it then. She rolled the dial slowly, listening for the changes in sound quality. She thought somewhere there must still be music, but the mountain was drowning it out, like a landslide, or an avalanche, like rushing water.

Deep down in the hissing and whispering, she thought she heard a voice. It was a woman's voice, low and continuous. Rei couldn't make out any words, but the voice was cold and hopeless. It murmured on and on to itself, alone in all the meaningless inhumanity of the mountain. Nobody heard it but her. Nobody was listening but her.

Rei had been leaning further and further forward, getting closer to the speakers, and when the driver's door opened she slipped and bumped her head on the steering wheel. Her father glared in at her.

"What are you doing? It's been fifteen minutes, we were starting to think something had happened."

"I'm sorry," Rei said, abashed. "I was listening to the woman in the mountain."

"What? No, never mind. Turn that off and come back inside. It's time you were in bed."

She could no longer hear the voice anyway. She silenced the radio and plodded back despondently after her father, noticing how his big untidy footprints had obliterated the neat line she'd made.

* * *

"You were right, we should have labelled these," Rei said. Before her was a stack of boxes. Some of them were Yuu's, and some were hers, and she had no idea which was which.

"You start on the left, I'll start on the right," Yuu suggested. "We can just open them up and look inside."

"And if they're full of books I'll know they're yours." Rei approached the pile without much enthusiasm. There seemed to be an awful lot to go through.

They soon discovered they worked fastest when she checked the boxes and Yuu carried them off to their designated rooms. It gave Rei time to look around the huge, empty living room and remind herself that this was _their_ house. It still didn't feel real.

They made good progress, and the pile was at least a quarter gone when she dug into the next box and - felt - heard -

Something like cold static raced up her arm and she pulled back. At the same time, there was a burst of sound that seemed to come from the middle of her head, an incoherent blur of whispers and white noise.

She reached into the box again, warily, and drew out a radio.

"Careful, it's an antique," said Yuu, coming down the stairs.

"It still works?"

"Maybe. Not like a normal wireless. It's meant to pick up... different frequencies."

Rei twisted one of the switches and was rewarded with a low crackle of static, no discernible voices. There didn't seem to be any way of tuning the thing. Yuu had started explaining where it came from, some sort of family heirloom, but Rei was barely listening. She found herself remembering a trip she'd taken with her family one winter, when she was little. They'd stayed a night at a traditional inn on the way to her grandparents' house. She remembered how it had snowed.

"Anyway," Yuu said, gently lifting the radio from her and replacing it in its box, "I'd better put it in the attic for now. It's too valuable to keep with my other devices."

"Okay," Rei said distractedly, brushing her hair back out of her eyes and rubbing her hands together. Her fingertips were still tingling from the electric shock, or whatever, that the radio had given her.

She didn't know now which mountain that had been. She had the feeling something had happened there, but she couldn't remember what. It was like trying to grasp at a dream.

"Rei."

She started at Yuu's touch on her shoulder. She hadn't heard him come back downstairs.

"That's enough for now, right? Let's head out and find something to eat. We can go through the rest tomorrow."

She nodded, trying to smile, trying to shrug off her unease. Then she turned, glancing out of the wide window at their little garden. A small sound caught in her throat.

"What?" Yuu said, enveloping her cold hands in his warm ones. "Is something wrong?"

"No," she said, "nothing. It's just the rain. For a second I thought it was snow."


End file.
